The increasing complexity of System-on-a-Chip (SOC) devices and the simultaneous demand for a reduction in the cost of chip testing has forced both integrated circuit (IC) manufacturers and tester vendors to rethink how IC testing should be performed. According to industry studies, without re-engineering the projected cost of testers will continue to rise dramatically in the near future.
A major reason for the high cost of test equipment is the specialized nature of conventional tester architecture. Each tester manufacturer has a number of tester platforms that are not only incompatible across companies such as Advantest, Teradyne and Agilent, but also incompatible across platforms within a company, such as the T3300, T5500 and T6600 series testers manufactured by Advantest. Because of these incompatibilities, each tester requires its own specialized hardware and software components, and these specialized hardware and software components cannot be used on other testers. In addition, a significant effort is required to port a test program from one tester to another, and to develop third party solutions. Even when a third party solution is developed for a platform, it cannot be ported or reused on a different platform. The translation process from one platform to another is generally complex and error prone, resulting in additional effort, time and increased test cost.
Datalogging is used to provide status information to the user when running a test or a series of tests. The information reported in a datalog may include the pass/fail status of the device under test (DUT), any relevant measured parameters, and the overall run status of the test itself. This information is typically used offline to assess the completion of a test run and the performance of the device being tested. The support of datalog capabilities allows users to output their test information from a designated source to a designated destination in a desired format.
One of the problems of the specialized tester architecture is that all hardware and software remain in a fixed configuration for a given tester. To test a hardware device or an IC, a dedicated test program is developed that uses some or all of the tester capabilities to define the test data, signals, waveforms, and current and voltage levels, as well as to collect the DUT response and to determine DUT pass/fail.
Since a test system needs to exercise a wide range of functionalities and operations in order to test a wide variety of test modules and their corresponding DUTs, there is a need for an open architecture test system that can be configured to support the wide variety of test modules. Specifically, in order to support the wide variety of test modules, there is a need for a datalog framework within the open architecture test system that can be configured to work with the different formats of the different sources and destinations of the test system.